Study: How location affects health, fitness app usage

At 10 pm, more people in California and the Midwest are using their fitness apps than those in the Tri-State area, (the New York, Connecticut, New Jersey region) according to a recent survey from analytics platform Mixpanel.

The data set is limited to apps and websites from the 1,851 companies that use Mixpanel’s services. Those include Jawbone, Fitbit, Amazon.com, Lyft, Kickstarter, and Dropbox.

For this survey, Mixpanel focused on three areas, California, the Tri-State Area and the Heartland region, which covers most of the Midwest.

“In California and the Midwest, folks are also firing up their fitness apps — whether this means squeezing in a gym visit, biking home from the bar, or simply walking the dog before bed,” Mixpanel explains in its blog. “People in New York and the Tri-State Area, however, are already cozied up for the night and hanging out on social networks.”

People in the Tri-State area use fitness apps more than gaming and ecommerce apps from 2 am to 7 am, while those in California use health and fitness apps the most from 5 am to 5 pm. At 5 pm, gaming apps take over, but health and fitness apps are still used heavily until they peak at 10 pm.

In the Midwest, health and fitness apps are only more popular than gaming apps at around one or two in the morning, although there’s very little activity going on at that time in general. Outside of those early morning hours, gaming apps are significantly more popular, but health and fitness apps come in second above e-commerce and social apps. Health app use peaks at around 4 or 5 pm.

The report also noted that in general, app use sees a jump after lunchtime, while people use websites more in the morning hours.

Another app analytics company, Flurry, released data last year that showed millennials’ smartphone activity, defined as young adults aged 25 to 34 years old, rose steadily during the day and peaked in the evening. This data also showed that millennials were using fitness and health apps twice as often as the average of other age groups. In a gender split, women were using health and fitness apps 200 percent more than men did.